I haven't sold a bike since 1992

The fun started to go out of the bike business with the arrival of index-only shifting systems in 1990. For a couple of years we could get top-mount shifters with friction option for mountain bikes. We took pride and pleasure in converting bikes back to the versatility and true freedom of friction shifting. But then supplies ran out, and all we could do was sort through the proprietary horseshit being dumped on us to find the least worst. I quit selling bikes and started just letting people buy them. I wanted no part in describing much of what we were forced to offer as "improvements."

Proprietary shifting systems were just the first wedge. Even before index-only systems, Shimano and Suntour used slightly different cog spacing, and other factors to enforce customer loyalty/entrapment. However, you could sometimes fudge something together using a merger of parts that worked well enough. And the friction option eliminated all issues except chain width. Chain width became a non-issue if you used a Sedisport chain, which you would want to do anyway. This was true until the advent of 9-speed, anyway. Manufacturers shifted their competitive aggression to other factors.

I thought about this yesterday as it took me hours to replace cables and housings on a Specialized Roubaix. All cables run internally. The customer wanted everything changed. To change shift cables, you have to run a sleeve over the old cable before unthreading it, to guide the new cable properly through the inaccessible interior of the frame. Because the rider wanted new housing, I had to untape the handlebar. Because he wisely heeded our advice to upgrade to 5mm housing, I had to change the in-line tension adjuster on the front derailleur cable, which is made to fit only 4mm.

Four millimeter shift housing is like deliberately constricting your tendons.

The brake housing was continuous, meaning that the housing itself disappears into the frame and emerges all the way back on the chainstay next to the rear disc brake caliper. The segment is so short and the bend so tight that I had to remove the caliper from the frame to get the housing out of it. This was partly because the ferrule was corroded into the cable adjuster, but also because the emergent section was so short. The section also aims upward, inviting water to wick its way into the housing. The cable I removed was rusty in that area.

To feed new housing, you first want to feed a new cable, and then extract the housing, so that you can feed the new housing up the new cable. Using the old cable you run the risk that the cable will fray as you feed the housing up it, snarling everything in the inaccessible darkness.

This is complete bullshit. The supposed advantages of internal cable routing are utterly meaningless to the average rider, even the average racer. How many non-professional, casual participants have ever lost a crit -- or even a road race -- because of the air drag on their externally-routed shift and brake wires? For that matter, in most amateur time trials, you'll have the Richie Riches who own dedicated TT bikes and then you'll have everyone else doing their best on whatever they have.

Racers will race on whatever they can get. When a competition involves a machine, a competitor will want the best machine, hopefully better than anyone else's machine, to get an unfair advantage. This drives technological innovation, leading to ever-evolving rules about what's allowed. A new advantage rapidly becomes the new norm. All it does, most of the time, is make the machines more expensive and harder to work on.

The Roubaix had looked pretty new when I started on it, but I soon realized that it was merely suspiciously clean. I suspected that the owner is a hoser. This turned out to be the case. The corroded bits were not from exposure to the weather, they were from exposure to misguided care. Do not clean your bike with flowing water. This is especially true with internal cable routing and other modern stylistic embellishments that look protective but aren't.

The bike has Specialized's Future Shock suspension. The rider had thought that the headset needed adjustment, but he was feeling crunchiness in the shock absorber mounted in the steerer tube. When I disassembled that collection of nesting parts held together with small bolts, I found rust in the parts that seemed well protected inside the frame. The shock uses a design similar to Cannondale's Headshok, with needle bearings riding on flat strips of metal. It's protected from above by a rubber boot, but water can seep in below the plastic cover that sits like a little rain hat over the frame at the head tube.

The boot only seals the top, but water comes from all directions. Put this bike on a roof rack and drive 60 miles per hour in a rainstorm. Clean it with a hose, high pressure or not. Water finds a way. I opened up the mechanism enough to get some oil into the needle bearings. That smoothed things out a bit.

On the other end of the shop, Torin was working on two obsolete Cannondale mountain bikes, one with a Lefty fork, and one with a Fox F100 fork fit with a reducing headset into the oversize Cannondale head tube. Both bikes were old enough to have 26-inch wheels.

The F100 fork has a leaky seal. It dates from the period in which we were seeing no mountain bike customers, so were paying little attention to the state of the art.  Our most active riders were all into road bikes at the time, and our most numerous customers were looking for hybrids and comfort bikes for the expanding system of recreation paths in the area. Finding parts looks like yet another treasure hunt. We'll pass on that. The suspension guru from a shop that enthusiastically served mountain bikers in Alton is now working at a shop in Concord. I have no problem handing off a problem to an expert in the field. As for the Lefty, only a Cannondale dealer can service that. We've been able to get some parts from Cannondale Experts, but we don't have the latest tools and factory support.

I said I haven't sold a bike since 1992, but that's not strictly true. Whenever possible I have sold bikes that combine some genuine improvements with the traditional simplicity and longevity of bikes from the mid and late 20th Century. They don't have complicated and inconvenient convenience features, or bulbous, modernistic frames. They're too sensible to be popular. Mostly they come from Surly, but there are other sources, like Rivendell.

Whenever someone says to me that their bike is 20 or 30 years old and they feel like they should get rid of it and get a nice new one, I tell them to let me have a look at it first. If it's a nice old bike in good shape, I tell them to invest in a few modern touches that improve on the simplicity rather than a whole new bike that obliterates it.

If someone wants a technical mountain bike or anything else excruciatingly "categorized" I nudge them toward their own research and let them pick their own poison. I'll assemble it, maintain it (for a price), and repair it to the best of my ability and the industry's indulgence, but I won't recommend anything.